In Defence Of The Humble Kit Lens

Don’t ditch your humble kit lens just because a “real photographer” tells you you need better glass on your camera.

Yes – your kit lens is cheap and cheerful! Yes – it is probably made of mostly plastic and uses lower-quality glass! Yes – it probably suffers from barrel and/or pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration! And yes it does have a widely varying aperture over it’s zoom range!

So, in defence of the humble kit lens, I recently decided to spend a week using only my kit lens to show that it can produce some very satisfying images. The lens in question is a DX Nikkor 18-55mm zoom supplied with the Nikon D5100 I bought back in late 2012.

Nearly all the images shown here were shot at or around the 35mm zoom setting, at f8 using aperture priority mode, f8 being close to the sweet spot of the lens.

All were post-processed in DxO PhotoLab 4 which is first-rate when it comes to automatically correcting lens distortion and sharpness. Then each photograph was given its individual finish in one of the Nik Collection components – because I could.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So my advice is – keep and use your humble kit lens – and get out and put the fun back into your photography by making images that make you happy.

All photos in this story were taken with a Nikon D5100 and 18-55mm kit lens, processed in DxO PhotoLab 4 and the Nik Collection; and incidentally were captured at, or near, some of our favourite freedom camping sites.